I’m absolutely stunned by Minister Roberts attitude to this long standing problem and his stunning flippant remarks about lawyers. These guys are sometimes the only avenue we have left in dealing with developers. If something goes wrong in a building, the developer runs a mile, closely followed by every government department you talk to. My “ambulance chasing lawyer” was very necessary in reigning in a developer who built a substandard building which was not even close to being to fire code, gave a long term contract to a strata manager that was clearly working against the scheme and working for the developer at other buildings, and owned indirectly through “other companys” 51% of the voting rights. As chair of the scheme, I had to put up with this developer slandering me and others on the committee and doing his best with his lawyers to do nothing about his responsibilities. Without his guidance, I would have definitely been screwed over! How this is ambulance chasing is beyond me!. If he minister really wants to make a difference, firstly get rid of private certifiers, or at the very least, there needs to be random checks on these guys. Id like to see how many jobs actually get defcted in this process. The truth is that they all are too scared to “defect” a developer who they work with regularly. How do they get their next job if they start to defect work? Any new certification scheme needs to include structural, fire, plumbing AND HVAC (plumbing and HVAC not normally subject to certification, and HVAC has virtually no “standards” but has been a big problem in some buildings with centralized heating/air).
Interestingly, my “ambulance chasing lawyer” is now very active in trying to rectify the shortcomings with our strata laws and compliance with building codes/warrantys. He too was innocently burned in one of Australia largest strata schemes where the building was not up to code. Each unit was up for $100,000 in rectification work on “brand new units” they couldn’t sell. I recall Sydney Council even wanted to condemn the building at one stage. The legals for this dragged on for a decade and he only knows too well the shortcomings of the current laws and the devastating effect that our inadequate laws have on ordinary people. Even worse for him, he was friends with the developer before he purchased his unit! He has campaigned selflessly for over a decade to try to put our outdated strata laws and our building warranty laws right and he had high hopes for a change with the new state government. It looks like he is going to be very disappointed along with thousands of strata unit owners, and i am sure he is not going to be happy about being called “an ambulance chaser”.